News/Commentary

Tucker calls NewsGuard the GLOBAL ‘censorship organization’ that received huge Pentagon contract

April 30, 2022 | | Print Article

At the end of a scathing, nearly 20-minute-long opening monologue Thursday, in response to the Biden administration’s creation of a Disinformation Governance Board, Tucker Carlson introduced his viewers to a global organization called NewsGuard, an organization Carlson claims “targets anyone who challenges the people in power.”

President Joe Biden’s Pentagon, said Carlson, “awarded a $750,000 contract to a group called NewsGuard.”

“Now, that contract is for ‘misinformation fingerprints,'” Carlson explained. “NewsGuard is an organization that claims to fight, quote, ‘misinformation,’ but in practice, is a censorship organization. It targets anyone who challenges the people in power.”


For those who have never heard of the fact-checking organization, NewsGuard employs a band of “trained journalists” who dig through online news sites such as this one and rates them according to nine criteria it claims are “apolitical.” For a monthly subscription, users can download the NewsGuard extension to their browser and view NewsGuards “Nutrition Labels,” which grants news sites it deems “reliable” and “trustworthy” green checks and marks those they say fail to “responsibly report” the news big red Xs.

Those ratings are then shared with prospective advertisers, meaning NewsGuard essentially tells companies which websites are worthy of their advertising dollars and which should be avoided like the plague.

Many who have come up against NewsGuard have alleged the organization unfairly targets conservative news organizations while giving obviously biased entities — many, such as CNN, which has repeatedly published and promoted demonstrably false stories — a big thumbs up.

But, while fact-checkers have become an almost expected annoyance to right-leaning readers and reporters, what many do not realize is how deeply connected NewsGuard is to agencies of the United States government.

On its own homepage, NewsGuard proudly boasts of its partnerships with the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the World Health Organization, and according to Carlson, the Department of Homeland Security is now availing itself of NewsGuard’s services.

“NewsGuard is currently preparing a blacklist of sites that contradict the national security state’s talking points on Ukraine and Russia,” Carlson revealed.

In other words, a news site that suggests Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is anything less than a heroic leader who absolutely should receive billions of American taxpayers’ dollars, for example, will likely receive a call from a NewsGuard journalist.

A call similar to the one received by Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone.

“So, this week, NewsGuard wrote a threatening email to the news site Grayzone, informing The Grayzone that they’re spreading ‘disinformation’ because they’re not reading a script,” Carlson reported. “So, here’s how the editor of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal, responded. He wrote this: ‘Do you seriously expect us to grovel for approval from the same tentacle of the national security state and financial oligarchy that has rated CNN as a highly credible news source and whose board of advisors is a grotesque gallery of corporate propagandist spooks, documented liars and war criminals who’ve never faced a scintilla of accountability for their actions?”

“Kind of overheated language,” Carlson stated. “Is it true?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Every word of it.”

And neither Carlson nor Blumenthal are wrong, though characterizing the NewsGuard board as “grotesque” will likely get a news site dinged for failing to handle “the difference between news and opinion responsibly,” which will reduce a site’s overall rating score by 12.5 points.

So, we at American Wire News will simply list some of the members of NewsGuard’s “bipartisan” Board of Advisors and let you decide how grotesque they are.

  • Don Baer, former White House Communications Director during the Clinton administration
  • Arne Duncan, former Secretary of Education under President Obama and the former chief executive of Chicago Public Schools
  • (Ret.) General Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA, former Director of the NSA, and former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
  • Tom Ridge, who served as the first Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush
  • Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of that bastion of truth and historical fact, Wikipedia

 

And that’s just a few of them.

Carlson praised Blumenthal’s response to NewsGuard.

“So, when Joe Biden’s censors come, that’s the way you respond,” Carlson stated. “‘Hey, pal, up yours. You want some disinformation? Here you go.'”

“You are a free person in a free country, and no law enforcement agency can ever tell you what to think or say,” Carlson reminded viewers. “Period.”

Melissa Fine
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